He Doesn't Pay
by LawlietLennoxLove
Summary: It may as well be his fucking motto when it comes to fucking – he doesn't pay – but he opens his eyes and realises that yes, he just has. Or he had, the one Rivers called what, his fugue state, and it doesn't make a fucking difference.


A/N: It doesn't do _Regeneration_ justice at all, not by a long shot, but somehow I _had_ to get this down. If only to unclutter my mind just a little.

He Doesn't Pay

He wakes to the mugginess of close, damp rooms with closed windows; he opens his eyes and sees that the ceiling is sagging with mould, like the flaccid, drooping jowls of the old, and streaks of undisclosed yellows and browns stain the cracking pucker of the plaster. There is a repugnant odour of sweat clinging where it'd dried over itself and again only a short while ago, of groping in the sewer-smell of unwashed linens, carelessly slung over sticky backs to be shaken off, struggled out of, and kicked hurriedly and haphazardly under the slumping, discoloured mattress of the bed.

It's not his room, that much he can accept for now. The first vestiges of panic start to creep in, the first thin, sneaking tendril-tips of chlorine gas that hang at the edges of his consciousness like so many wolves weighing him up, contemplating whether or not to close in for the kill. He doesn't give them the chance: sudden disgust that turns his stomach, that sends acid spreading in revulsion, sends them disbanding, corroding and ridiculously off the mark in the face of it.

He stares straight up at the mouldering, festering ceiling that hasn't been cleaned in God knows how long, and longer still that someone's cared about it – even he, who notes and disparages it with a further rising of sickened bile, doesn't. He wants to inhale a deep breath of the sharp whitewash-air of his own frigid little room, missing it as he'd suddenly find himself, out of nowhere, quite abruptly missing a Woodbine, an addict's furious craving. He's on leave, he _deserves_ it, he fucking _deserves_ the air that he'd disliked for its cold, fine-grained impersonality that wouldn't change in the slightest even if one overdue day the canary had its lungs shrivelled away elsewhere in a ten feet deep ditch or the wasteland around it, that stank of the living, with gangrene or some other disease, and the dead, over which rats with their dirty fur clotted with splatted insides feasted, both festering alike, and stank something _familiar_.

Much as he would like to do the same here, to take in a lungful to stave off the nausea that rises up to the back of his mouth in the taste of soured yeast, he fights the temptation with a lesser breath, to remind himself that any more than that, and most likely he _will_ up and retch over the side of the bed that isn't fucking his. Not that he cares for the mess it would make, not at all, though that alone might have him coming back, vindictive, just to see whether they would bother to take a rag to it. Probably not.

_They_, he'd used, but in all likelihood it was just another set of sleazy legs that walked to do the shopping and brought it upstairs with her. In these times of austerity, one had to use every means possible to keep the coins passed from sweaty palms rolling in. Even if that meant there was no time left between five-minute shifts to scrub the ceiling, the floor, the hand-printed walls, the soiled sheets. They were part of the package, and the soldiers who all had a girl somewhere up north who snuck in with their clenched handful of slicked coppers knew what they were getting. All that exercise, and still the thighs were that flabby.

He's lying in the shallowed-out trough of the imprints of many before him: he doesn't want to look to the sides, and see the filthy carpet, the fingerprints on the vanity mirror, the flaking chair with its threadbare cushion, the crumpled tissues on the floor, their thick smudges of cheap, pasting cosmetics. More to the point, he doesn't want to see the woman beside him (he knows she must be there, it's something of a matter of principle that one did not leave one of those men without Christian names and who would die the next day without Christian burials alone in their own room), the coarse hair, the slack mouth, the flesh that weighs down into the dirtied covers but on _which side? _He doesn't want to reach out and touch it, either: he knows for a fact that he'd much rather handle a half-decayed corpse, because that at least was accepted to be in his job description, and he's used to it anyway, and the feeling is the same as touching a door handle or the wrapping of a cigarette.

He wonders how he'd gotten himself into this. Whether, on the way home from where, he doesn't know, only that he stepped outside into the biting night at half eight, for no reason at all he'd tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder, and with clear breath stated that he'd like to turn around, and find the…_what_? Did he just dig out a few notes and tell him to drop him off there, wherever they were, or did he cut out the pussyfooting and ask for the directions to the nearest brothel, nearest woman between twenty and fifty, or simply the nearest fuck?

He didn't fucking pay, but he has – or at least, the other him has, the one without a name, without a father and without asthma – and the damage is done, and he can't very well rifle around for the money that was no longer his then up and leave without an explanation, not that there was one that wouldn't instantly send him right back to Craiglockhart courtesy of a terse, disbelieving woman before he could call upon someone – Rivers – to back him up. What's worse he doesn't even remember it. What was it Rivers had said? Immature, childish. He clenches his teeth at the image in his head, the one with his chin on clasped hands and his elbows on the desk, transferring a wave of anger towards the perpetually, infuriatingly _understanding _face. Not childishness rearing its head, _he_ wasn't Rivers' diagnosis, but a sickened, uncomprehending frustration how downright _malicious_ had somehow slipped the unsparingly accurate, all-catching net.


End file.
